How to get Star Ratings in your Google Adwords Ads

Get Seller Ratings Stars on Adwords

Have you ever wondered how to get those stars on your Google Adwords ads? Want to easily increase conversions? Google has now made it a lot more simple to get the stars. Before you had to do all kinds of integration into your Google Base or Google merchant account, but not anymore. Today what Google does is license out to 31 independent 3rd party review companies. These companies are authorized by Google and the stars are normally the ones that you see in Adwords Ads. You’ll also see stars in Google Shopping PLAs. Not only will the star ratings show in your Google Adwords and now BingAds/Yahoo. BTW, BingAds controls Yahoo PPC. These seller rating stars will work for both service based companies and eCommerce websites.

Finding Companies that are authorized review sites by Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Let’s face it, there are many review sites out there. Maybe you even use one of them, but those reviews will not show as star ratings in Google Adwords, BingAds/Yahoo, nor Google Shopping if it’s not licensed by Google. There are 31 companies that are licensed by Google. These companies are in different countries and the languages range from English to Japanese. You can scroll down to see the best ones in English or see a list of them here. ResellerRatings, TrustPilot,Bizrate, & Shopper Approved are just some of them.

Criteria

In order to get these stars you will need to be on the Search or the Display Network. The searcher must be on Google in one of these 31 countries (updated 8/16/2017): Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Czechia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Indonesia, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United States, and the United Kingdom. Your business must have at least 150 reviews all from within the past 12 months. [SIDE NOTE: 150 reviews is a lot for a mom & pop company. You can send a special URL to all your past customers to get a jump start to reach the 150 mark]. In addition, the reviews must have a rating of at least 3.5 stars or higher. You don’t need a Google merchant account anymore to get the stars. Google says these ratings are free, but in my experience you pretty much have to pay the 3rd party review site so in my book yes it is free to have the stars appear on your Google Adwords ads. It’s is not free overall because you will be paying a monthly subscription.

As you start getting these reviews on the independent third-party websites, you will probably surpass the minimum of 150 reviews that Google requires. I noticed that when I hit the required amount of reviews, Google still had not indexed all those reviews. I had a client who had hit 84 reviews on Shopper Approved, but Google had only index maybe about 15. There is a lag time between the time you get the reviews and when Google indexes the reviews. I would say it’s about 3 to 4 weeks. And this has happened to me about 10 times already with 10 different clients. So don’t be getting frustrated like I did and start calling up your representative at Google AdWords asking, “Why am I not seeing my stars on my Google AdWords ads?” If you have set up your data feed from the independent third party review website, eventually Google will index the reviews. It’ll take time.

You may be wondering why should you pay extra money a month to get the stars? Well the real answer is you may be making more money. This would be likely if you are in an industry where none of the competition is doing this. In addition, you should make an annotation in Google Analytics on the day you have started getting the stars on your ads and check to see if conversion rates have increased starting that day. Also, you can embed your reviews onto your website and build trustworthiness.

Choosing a review company

When you start talking to these companies, they are always going to say that their product is better than the competition. It all comes down to you getting the stars on your Adwords ads. Some will allow you to reach out to your past customers and ask them for reviews. Others will charge for that feature. For my clients it was imperative that we ask their past customers for reviews by sending them the link to the review survey. It gave my clients a jump start on the review campaigns.

I did some research on several third party review sites and found that some of them do contracts for 1 year. I would recommend going with one that is a monthly subscription with no contract.

For those of you who are on a smaller budget (like me), I would highly recommend looking into Shopper Approved versus the other review sites, because they only cost about $99 a month. UPDATE: Use our link below and it’s $79/mo (NO CONTRACTS). The other companies on this list cost between $400 and $599 per month. In addition, if someone leaves you a bad review on Shopper Approved, you can dispute it. I have done this a couple times where the customer left a one out of five star rating. It was an undeserved review so I disputed it. Now let me be upfront, you cannot fight all the negative reviews that will be coming through because the companies like Shopper Approved will not change the review for you if it is a legit negative review.

So to save you time here are the five companies I narrowed it down to. Hopefully this will save you time.

BEWARE – Read 1st before buying!

1) Do NOT pay for things you’ll never use. If you don’t have an ecommerce site, then you don’t need product reviews. But you’ll need Seller Reviews.
2) Always remember this. Google is the one who runs the Seller Review platform on Adwords. All these 3rd party review companies need to submit reviews in a pre-formatted XML feed into Adwords. Your goal is simple: GET STARS ON ADWORDS ADS. Don’t get distracted with all the upsells these companies will use to make themselves look different & get more of your money. They are nice features to have if you can afford it. All the companies have to use the same formatted XML feed as required by Google.

If you need help picking a company, contact me on live chat or through my contact page. I have worked with all these companies.

Shopper Approved

Starts at $79/mo

https://www.shopperapproved.com/special/planetmarketing/78Shopper Approved(Update 9/28/2016) – Starts at $79/mo “if” you use our link! If not, then it’s $99/mo (but you have to call them since their site says $199/mo to start) and you have to pay upfront $1188 for the entire year. Save $20.00/mo + get 60 days FREE trial! Shopper Approved is based out of Utah and seem like very humble people. Their rates are on a sliding scale which normally start at $199/mo. The $79/mo plan is for small companies. If you have any problems, you can reach us through live chat. We will have remote access to your Shopper Approved dashboard. Once you sign up using the 60-day free trial, Cresta or Todd will contact you. They are great, humble people. SA is a private company with no outside investors.

Disclaimer: Shopper Approved asked us to partner with them. We have no problem recommending them because they are working for all of our clients. Use our partner link to get 60 days of free service instead of the typical 30 days.

Verified Reviews

Starts at $80/mo

https://www.planetmarketing.com/review-companies/verified-reviewsVerified-Reviews(Added to this list on 10/21/2016) – 15 day free trial + no credit card needed! It’s normally $99/mo, but once you sign up for the free trial, CALL Pierre and ask him about the 20% discount. This is a month-to-month (no contract) subscription. Most people don’t wait for the 15 day free trial to end because it’s a great option. Talk to Pierre if you need a demo and tell him you heard about the 20% discount on Planet Marketing. The discount is not advertised on his site! Again, no credit card needed.

Trust Pilot

Starts at $299+/mo

https://www.planetmarketing.com/review-companies/trust-pilotTrust Pilot – (Update 6/1/2017: Trust Pilot’s pricing has changed many times in the past 2 years. The smallest package starts at $299/mo. Trust Pilot called me a long time ago and tried to sell me on their service. At that time, they didn’t show their prices on their site. Now they are displaying their smallest package which starts at $299/mo; HOWEVER, this has to be paid upfront for the whole year! $3588 USD upfront? OUCH! Anyway, one thing with Trust Pilot is you can price haggle them. Lesson: NEGOTIATE with TrustPilot and give them a low ball offer, especially since they require payment upfront for a whole year. TP is a great company if you have a medium -large sized business. They have their own following too, but it’s stronger in UK. TP is has outside investors.

If you want to try out TrustPilot for free and simply get reviews on your Adwords Ads, go to our TrustPilot partner link. You’re going to get a hard core salesman so be prepared! Once that trial is up, you’ll need to pay whatever you negotiate.

ResellerRatings – For the longest time ResellerRatings was the biggest one of all the review sites. Their pricing is based off an “algorithm” which means your pricing is subject to change each month. Something funny though, it has the worse reviews too! I haven’t heard too much about RR lately so you’ll need to talk to them or do some research.

We would recommend the above 5 companies in this order: 1) Shopper Approved 2) Verified Reviews 3) Yotpo 4) Trustpilot 5) ResellerRatings. In addition to seller ratings, all five companies offer product reviews (Shopper Approved is the best value for month-to-month).

SIDE NOTE: These types of reviews are COMPLETELY different than the rich snippet schema.org reviews that show on organic results (normally called product reviews). Here is our blog post of How to Get Product Reviews on Google Search.

Francisco is the owner of Planet Marketing. He has many years of experience online marketing and web development. In his spare time he enjoys writing about internet marketing and web development. He loves coaching people and has a few students.
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We are an online store for the Mexican market. Do you have any idea which of the sites you mentioned might work for google.mx? We have had difficulty getting our stars on for this market. Thanks!!! And thanks for your great article as well.

I don’t think Mexico is part of this. You may need to contact the 3rd party companies. Try contacting them through Twitter. It’ll probably be way faster.
You can also try to get organic star ratings by implementing schema.org ratings. Let me know if you need more help.

Very informative article. TrustPilot has been very persistent in getting us to sign on with them. Your article provides valuable insight that I hadn’t found elsewhere online. I will likely contact Shopper Approved. I agree with your “negotiate” assessment.

Jim, the guys at Shopper Approved are awesome at costumer service. I don’t think you can negotitate with Shopper Approved, but with expensive TrustPilot, you probably still can. You know what the TrustPilot rep told me when I said we were looking at Shopper Approved? He said, “You get what you pay for.” Poor guy. I don’t care about Trustpilot’s community. I care about my clients’ star ratings.

No, I don’t think G+ review show up in Adwords. They do show up in Google Shopping though. The stars from Shopper Approved and Trust Pilot are only for PAID search, not the Google Maps area. That’s considered non-paid

Great stuff here, I’ve been spending hours searching for a service to do this after realizing Yotpo charges $500 per month. What service do you recommend for product reviews on Google Shopping ads…same ones?

Hey Jason, Francisco here. I wrote the post. $500/mo!? Tell the to get lost. It’s only stars. 🙂
Go with Shopper Approved. They have the individual product review feature too. Go ahead and sign up to the 60-day free trial. If you need help, let me know. Go to my partner link and you’ll only pay the $29.95. They may have raised their price though.

Go for it! You need to convince your prospects that you have taken care of your clients. Check out all the softwares. If you’re a small company like us, most likely Shopper Approved or Yotpo will work.

I just signed up with Trust Pilot today. I’m based in Australia. I thought that if I could use their free version for the 14 day trial period and get 30 reviews in that time. The only problem is that I’m going to have to pay eventually so that I can keep adding more reviews.

Thanks for the point about negotiating the price with them – how low do you think they will go? The annual pricing is ridiculous.

Really useful article. Does anyone have a view of Feefo? They seem to be a significant player in this space and have a small business deal that looks pretty competitive. From a UK perspective, Feefo and Trustpilot are the 2 brands that I’d recognise and trust.

I don’t know if Feefo will get stars on Adwords Ads or on Bing Ads. I have heard of Feefo several times. It looks more like a customer feedback system, not too much of a review system that puts seller ratings stars on Google Adwords. Maybe I’m wrong.

I’m the Product Specialist at Feefo, so thought I could jump in on Richards query and confirm that we can indeed get stars on Adwords and Bing Ads.

In essence, we are a review platform that functions much in the same way as the companies you have mentioned. Our main difference (from many review providers) is that we are an invite-only platform, so every review is tied to a direct purchase in order to prevent fake reviews. In the UK space, I would consider companies like Bazaarvoice, TP, Yotpo and TrustedShops to be a few of our main competitors. There are quite a few companies in this space now but we are certainly a major player in the UK market.

If you want an update on where we are or an overview of Feefo then I’d happily provide you some info for future reference.

Hi William,
thanks for the input. I really like that it’s invite only. From what I remember about Trust Pilot is that anyone, including a competitor, can leave a review.
I see Feefo doesn’t give pricing upfront like many other companies. Where does pricing start?

Your surmise is correct regarding TP. It’s a shame that fake reviews are rife across the online landscape but that’s the nature of the internets freedom. There is, however, a strong culture change with companies like Amazon and government departments in the UK like the Competitive Markets Authority, who are taking big steps in cracking down on this very issue.

I will leave a couple of links below in this regard FYI.

The pricing structure depends on your companies business model first and foremost.

For Shopify users we have a freemium solution if they want to try before they buy https://apps.shopify.com/feefo-reviews (forgive the shameless plug).
We base our pricing on the number of feedback emails that we send out on behalf of a customer, per month. We are however exploring other pricing models, so this is purely how we operate currently and not necessarily how it will be in Q4 or 2017.

This is mainly because we recognise the value in having an easy to view pricing structure but because of our bespoke methodology and increasing feature repository, it’s progressively harder to give flat numbers for pricing.

Thank you for sharing our URL and if yourself or anyone on this thread would like to discuss anything further then I will do my best to answer.

We’ve been using Shopper Approved for the past year and have collected over 600 reviews. We just implemented Google Trusted Store with the anticipation of using it in place of Shopper Approved, but I don’t want to lose the reviews from Shopper Approved. If we use Google Trusted Store, do we have to start all over with reviews? Does anyone have experience making this switch?

I use Verified Reviews I find them way more cost effective and compare to shopper approved they are cheaper on a yearly basis with no contract. I recommend those guys for small to medium businesses. Pretty straight forward solution.

Thanks Andres,
I see Verified-Reviews.com now has a license from Google. Their price point is $99/mo compared to Shopper Approved’s $39/mo. Most people who read this blog post only want stars to show on their Adwords ads and the ability to embed reviews onto their sites. https://www.verified-reviews.com/index.php?page=mod_tarifs

If people are looking for product reviews (not seller reviews which this post is about), then Verified Reviews’ price is around what Shopper Approved charges. But BOTH are cheaper than Trust Pilot and Yotpo.

I don’t think it’s easier since Google just changed the requirement from 30 reviews to 150 reviews within the last 12 months to qualify for showing the star rating in AdWords ads. That is a massive change for small companies. And Google had already aggregated reviews from certain 3rd party review sites for their ratings – I don’t see how that has changed.

Hi HikingMike,
yes there are a lot of small companies affected by this change. Even us at planetmarketing.com have been affected, but now we ask everybody to leave us a review. Most people we help though live chat are glad to leave a review even though they aren’t a customer. To me a genuine review is a genuine review, whether you helped someone for free or whether they paid.

Shopper Approved is based on a sliding scale. from 1-900 reviews, you pay $79/mo (normally $99/mo). From 901 – 2000 you pay $159/mo (normally $199/mo). If you have that many reviews, you can afford the package. I don’t have anywhere near that many reviews and it’s already paying off many times over.https://www.shopperapproved.com/special/planetmarketing/78

interesting article on a topic that seems to be lacking in information online. My question is from the other side of things. Our site, http://www.socialsurvey.com/ is focused on reviews for real estate agents and loan originators. We have a client that wants to use the reviews she has collected for her 100+ agents in Google PPC ads and asked us if we are “licensed” by Google. I think she is asking me if Google recognizes our site as an “independent source” of reviews.

Great question. But there are only around 30-40 companies that are licensed by Google to feed reviews into their Adwords system. I know a couple companies that have tried, but they said it’s a super long wait. If you want, I can put you client in touch with the owners of the review companies.

I find it hard to believe that you need that many reviews in such a short period of time to show up in the searches. It appears that my competitors are showing up and I seriously doubt they have that many reviews.

Yeah, Google changed it from 30 per year to 150 per year. I think some industries will have a tough time hitting 150. If you can hit the 150 reviews (it’s 12.5 average per month), then you might want to consider LOCAL reviews like Shopper Approved Local where the review is submitted to places like Facebook, Google +, YP.com, etc. Here’s the link: http://shopperapprovedlocal.com/
Birdeye.com is also another one for LOCAL reviews. HOWEVER, Birdeye will not syndicate the local reviews in to Adwords. SA will.

I just surpassed the 150 in 12 month review mark. But when I visit the Google Link https://www.google.com/shopping/seller?q=example.com my site still has no reviews indexed at all. Actually, says we don’t have a seller rating at all. Does Google not include your site on this page until you surpass the 150 mark?